What broke
In the autumn of 2023 I was working twelve-hour days and getting less done than I had the year before at eight. I read the same paragraph of a design doc four times and could not hold it.
It did not look like a crisis from outside. Things shipped. That is the part worth saying out loud: by the time it is visible in the output, it has been true for months.
Three things had broken, and none of them was workload in the abstract: cadence, on-call, and the calendar.
What we changed
Not much, and slowly. Every change we made was small enough that reverting it would have been embarrassing rather than expensive.
A smaller team on each surface, so two people owned a thing instead of six people half-owning it.
An on-call rotation that genuinely respects time off — including a rule that the person who was paged overnight does not work the next morning.
No-meeting Tuesdays, held by the leadership team first. It died the first time we tried it because we did not.
A hard end to the day for me personally, enforced by someone else putting it in the calendar.
What did not change
The work is still hard and the quarters are still uneven. We did not discover a trick. Anyone selling a four-day week as the answer to this is selling something.
And I still check messages at night more than I should. Progress, not a cure.
What I would tell someone in it
Write down, for a week, which tasks only you can do. Not which tasks you are doing — which ones would genuinely stop if you did not. For me the list was four items long and two of them were habits, not dependencies.
Then hand one of them away badly. The version where you document it perfectly first is the version that never happens.
And tell someone. The two months I spent managing it privately were the two months it got worse, and the conversation I was dreading lasted about eleven minutes.
Where I am now
Better. Eight-hour days, most days, and I can read the design doc. The company shipped more in 2025 than in 2023 with roughly the same headcount, which I mention not as proof but because I expected the opposite and was wrong.
If you are in the same place: the thing that helped was not working less. It was having fewer things that only I could do.